There is a certain scale where the extra cost of the AWS managed offering surpasses the cost of hiring a full time engineer to manage your own. My company is way past that point. Like most things cloud, the answer is "it depends".
Thanks for the civil response, it has been a long week.
My take on it is that for some companies using hosted Elastic (not AWS’ horror) is more probable if their business is not maintaining large clusters in house. This is along the lines of having a live-in nanny more than an occasional housekeeper. It is a luxury, and one in which having an Elastic nanny (PaaS/DBaaS) might make business sense.
